


allt under den linden så gröna

by meritmut



Series: your skin suits you best [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Folklore, Gen, Huldra Rey, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Reys that definitely want to eat you, Skogsrå Rey, Swedish folklore, forests that probably want to eat you, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 13:36:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17407871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: His dreams were dark, fanciful things, and sometimes Ben was afraid of them.





	allt under den linden så gröna

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts), [thievesguilding](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thievesguilding/gifts).



> title from 'i riden så'

**

“You’ve been quiet today.”

His uncle is a wise man, even if he chooses to dress like he’s spent the last decade sleeping under a tree. His mind is sharp: his clear blue eyes miss nothing.

Ben won’t meet them. “I saw something. In the woods.”

“Did you? Want to tell me about it?”

“Can’t.” Ben feels the tips of his ears burn. “I promised.”

“Oh, well, better not. You must never break a promise made in the wood. They have a way of following you home.” Luke’s right hand shifts where it rests on his knee, an involuntary twitch that nevertheless draws Ben’s gaze.

It seems involuntary, at least, but Ben wonders. Luke is so still, like the surface of a winter lake. So little ever disturbs that glassy calm.

He tries not to look at it normally; the hand, even though it fascinates him to no end, but something about the little gesture feels like permission and when his eyes fall on the limb nestled in his uncle’s sleeve Ben finds he cannot pull them away again.

It is a limb, he supposes, in the way that old, weathered things have limbs, boughs and arms for embracing and ensnaring. Luke is not so old and not much weathered, but he’s always been different. Strange, even in this house where uncanny things have always found a home: Ben’s always thought that there were more lifetimes in his uncle’s eyes than he wears on his face, more stories than he had gotten around to telling, and the lump of twisted wood that sits where flesh and blood should be only seems to prove it.

 _What promise followed you,_ Ben wants to ask, but those grave eyes caution: _another time._

Luke’s lessons are never done in a single sitting. There is always another time: another riddle, something you don’t realise you have learned until it unfurls like another sense in your mind; an instinct you might have had inside you all along.

 _Cryptic,_ Ben’s mother calls it. _Long-winded,_ says his father.

 _Well, sure,_ his uncle will usually answer. _I live a quiet life, I take my fun where I can get it._

“Come,” Luke rises to his feet with the ease of a man half his age _(and how old is that?_ Ben asked once, _Mama will never say—)_. The arm disappears within the folds of his robe and just like that, the spell is broken. His uncle is grinning. “Supper won’t catch itself.”

 

**

 

He dreamed of strange creatures in the forest long before he ever met one.

(He never counted Luke, in this, because his strangeness was familiar, and in his company the wood did not seem quite so mysterious.)

His dreams were dark, fanciful things, and sometimes Ben was afraid of them. Sometimes he told Luke as much, and his uncle would always have the same answer.

 _Your dreams can’t hurt you, Ben,_ he would say, and maybe he meant it as a reassurance but it was hard to be comforted because he would always go on and add, _but you should heed them, for they will keep you on your guard in the wood, and that is where the real danger is._

Ben is almost a man grown before he ventures into the forest alone.

 

**

 

He finds her sitting by the river again, her feet dangling like fish in the water. Her tail is tucked over her right hip; the end twitches restlessly in her lap.

She is fully clothed, this time, praise God. Her petticoats are rucked up around her white thighs to keep them dry and a braver youth than he might take liberties, but Ben likes having eyes in his head too much to let them wander.

“Did you tell anyone about me?” She is braiding her long hair as he draws closer to the opposite bank. The river is narrow here, only three feet or so between them, and the presence of running water makes Ben bold: he comes right up to the river’s edge and seats himself across from her.

“No. I promised.”

 _“Ha.”_ She glances up at him disbelievingly. “Your kind are always making promises and breaking them.”

“Were you testing me, then?” He does not like that thought. He has never done well in tests he couldn’t prepare for.

“No.” The girl, or the thing that looks like a girl, shrugs her shoulders gracelessly. Ben remembers what those shoulders looked like bare and turns his head so she can’t read the memory on his face. “You could have told, and that would’ve been that.”

“But I didn’t,” he insists. “Will you tell me your name now?”

“What do you want with it?”

Ben falters. He doesn’t know, only that he wants it, and it seems a fair enough repayment for his silence (not that he’d expected one, or promised in the hope of a reward, but she is the one who speaks of gifts and bargains and _balance_ and he knows the laws of the wild well enough to answer in the same vein).

“I’m Ben.”

“I know.”

“Then you know more than I do.” He is growing surly now—a defensive trait. His father’s influence, his mother says. His mother’s, says Han. Whichever, he cannot help it and he hates that too.

She senses it. “Are you afraid?”

One of Luke’s first lessons: never let the wood see your fear. Even when it is kind to you, and speaks like it would understand. Even when it wears a pretty girl’s face.

“Should I be?”

“Maybe. If you were clever.”

“Maybe I’m not clever, then.”

Her eyes are dark and glint. “Maybe. You didn’t tell, after all. Does anyone know you’re here?”

The fey folk can smell a lie. Still—“my mother.”

“Of course.” She does not believe him. “But the wood is wide, and it’ll be dark before you know it. People get lost all the time.”

Ben scowls. “Are you trying to make me afraid?”

Her freckled face scrunches in a grin and he can almost see the auburn switch of the tail below her knees. He forces himself not to look at it. “Is it working?”

“No.” _Liar._

Her head cocks to one side, curious as a crow. “You are afraid,” she observes. “I can feel it. And—very lonely.”

“Like you,” the words are out of his mouth before his brain can catch up with them, blurted into the winter air. “I can feel you too, fröken. You are the loneliest thing in this forest. Is that why you must bargain company out of village boys?”

He sees immediately that he has struck her deep and in that moment Ben thinks this is it—this is when she takes back her goodwill and casts a spell on him with her voice and her eyes, drags him into the dark heart of the wood never to be seen again, and he’ll have brought it on himself with his big thoughtless mouth like Mama always said he would.

_Too much like your father, that mouth will get you in trouble one of these days._

_Look who’s talking, Princess._

But the maid does not lunge at him, claws out and sharp teeth bared and a scream on her lips that will stop his heart. She simply looks down at her hands, brown and freckled with the sun, earth under her nails and strange tufts of rust-coloured hair growing between her knuckles and her knobbly wristbones.

No. Not hair, he realises. Fur.

“You’re clever,” she says eventually, and looks back up at him. “I am called Rey.”

When he gapes at her, stunned that she isn’t currently pulling his eyeballs out through his nose, the huldra shrugs. “Fair is fair.”

 

**

 

There is a woman in the water and it is too late to turn back and hope that she won’t see him on the river’s far bank: his only hope is that she’ll believe him when he swears he wasn’t watching her— _bathe?_

Is she bathing? It is hard to tell; Ben thinks maybe one of her petticoats has slipped loose and snagged on the ground but a second glance stuns him into stillness, because no—it isn’t her skirt, or any garment, but something else entirely.

There, held daintily over the ground behind her knees, red as beech leaves and glossy as a horse chestnut, is a fox’s tail.

Ben blinks.

Opens his mouth.

Closes it again.

Remembers, in the nick of time, his manners.

“Pardon me, fröken,” he blurts out. “Your stocking is caught on a thorn.”

The young woman’s head had snapped upward at the sound of his voice, but now she follows his gaze down to her feet and her eyes go wide at the sight of her tail. No sooner has she noticed it then it is whisked back up under her petticoat, and she turns back to him with a wary smile.

“My thanks,” she says.

“Not at all,” demurs Ben, ducking his head to hide the fact that his cheeks are hot. Now that the oddity of the tail is gone he is left with an acute awareness of her half-dressed state—her missing blouse, her fair, freckled shoulders, the ever-so-faint translucency of her cotton chemise over her breast.

His mind stumbles over stories of lonesome maidens in the wood, lovely and melancholy and too easily mistaken for human. She will play the part of an ordinary girl too well: doe-eyed, sweet-tempered and clever, but if you keep your wits about you there are things that give away her fey nature; her too-bright eyes and too-sharp teeth, the twigs and berries she likes to thread into her hair and—if you should catch her at unawares—the fur of a wild beast beneath her clothes.

“What do they call you?” The maid has a nice voice. He must not imagine that his knowledge of her true nature inures him to her charm.

“Ben,” he answers without thinking, and he can see on her face that she is as startled as him that he spoke honestly. She regards him for a moment more, evidently trying to decide if he is simple or not.

Then she nods, smiling a little more warmly. “My thanks again to you, Ben.”

**


End file.
